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Before the NBA abruptly suspended the regular season due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Houston Rockets were in the throes of a grand experiment, intriguingly embracing a small-ball lineup while eyeballing another potentially extended postseason run. Four-plus months later, the Rockets (40-24) will pick up where they left off, facing the Dallas Mavericks (40-27) on Friday in a seeding game at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando. The Rockets enter the restart in sixth place in the Western Conference standings. With the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs set to be contested in Central Florida, the concept of home-court advantage has been devalued, rendering seeding an exercise in securing favorable first-round matchups. For teams that fancy themselves as title contenders, that work is beginning. "These three preseason games and our practices, we've used those as opportunities to work on our offense and defense and make sure we're in shape t

The Sacramento Kings and San Antonio Spurs reboot their final run toward the NBA playoffs when they square off Friday at the Visa Athletic Center near Orlando, Fla., in the two teams' first official game since the stoppage for COVID-19 on March 11. Twenty-two teams (13 of them in the Western Conference) will return to play during the 2019-20 season restart. The teams consist of the 16 (eight per conference) already in playoff position and the six teams, five of them from the West, that are within six games of the eighth seed in their respective conferences. The teams will play an eight-game schedule at the NBA "bubble" in the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex at Walt Disney World. From these, the top seven teams in each conference will advance, with the final eighth seed in each conference being determined by a potential play-in tournament before the traditional 16-team playoffs. The Spurs hit the reboot with a record of 27-36, the second-worst record of the Western

The SEC’s decision to play a 10-game conference-only model in 2020 eliminated some of college football's biggest rivalry games. If 2020 wasn’t already bad enough, it will not include the following: Florida-Florida State. Georgia-Georgia Tech. South Carolina-Clemson. Texas-LSU. Tennessee-Oklahoma. Arkansas-Notre Dame. The SEC’s decision Thursday to adopt a 10-game conference-only model came at a price. Some of college football’s biggest marquee matchups are eliminated. This feels weird. It doesn’t feel right. In fact, it feels terrible. So, it feels very 2020. Administrators from some of those schools fought to preserve those games—South Carolina’s president even voted against the scheduling model—but alas, it couldn’t be done. This is 2020—the Year of the Terrible—and we’ll all need to come to grips with a season, if played at all, that is beyond the bizarre. We’ll try to answer two questions in this column: 1) Why did the SEC chose that schedule model? 2) How might

Players and coaches from both teams, as well as the game's referees, knelt together as the national anthem was played. As the NBA prepared to take the court for the first time during its Orlando restart plan, the New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz knelt on the sideline during the pregame national anthem. Coaches and game referees also joined in the kneeling, while both teams wore Black Lives Matter shirts on top of their warm-ups. NBA commissioner Adam Silver issued a statement saying he supported the teams' decision to protest during the anthem. “I respect our teams’ unified act of peaceful protest for social justice and under these unique circumstances will not enforce our long-standing rule requiring standing during the playing of our national anthem,” Silver said. The Jazz released a statement after the pre-game demonstration, supporting the players' ability to exercise their First Amendment rights. “We are a values-based organization and believe in the fo

The speedy Canucks clash with the stingy underdog Wild. Who will prevail: the youth or the wily vets? VANCOUVER CANUCKS – By Brian Costello Go back to season previews for 2019-20 and virtually every prognosticator tabbed the Canucks as needing another rebuilding season and surely out of the playoffs. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll see some of those soothsayers also added the footnote that Vancouver could be that one team that stuns the field and makes an enormous stride forward. Trades by GM Jim Benning the past couple years brought in top-six forwards J.T. Miller, Tyler Toffoli and Tanner Pearson. Their pace of scoring is at the top of the charts in Vancouver. Add this cast to homegrown stars Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser and Bo Horvat, plus the fast-improving Adam Gaudette and Jake Virtanen, and the Canucks have one of the deepest and most balanced lineups in the West. The Canucks can get you in a variety of ways. Try to shut down the speed and puck movement of Petters

With SEC chess pieces moving behind the scenes, the ACC launched a surprise checkmate on Wednesday in the ongoing college football schedule saga. They stressed unity. They had Zoom calls together for weeks, months. They were all in this together, the commissioners of college football’s power conferences, trying to navigate a challenge the likes of which they’d never seen before. Yeah, good talk. That was in the spring, when both camaraderie and the football season were easy to envision in the abstract. Here in the heat of July, with time ticking toward a maybe kickoff, they all have reverted to form. Now and forever, it’s every rich conference for itself in college football. This is part of the deal in a patchwork of 130 schools with no legitimate unifying element. It was that way a decade ago, when realignment turned into a brazen series of land grabs purely designed to maximize individual league revenue. It was that way earlier this month, when the Big Ten and Pac-12 were the f